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Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Pound-for-Pound Update 2-11-15

Mikey Garcia hasn't fought since January of 2014 and doesn't yet have his next fight scheduled. Given his inactivity, he has been removed from the Saturday Night Boxing pound-for-pound list. For Garcia's replacement in the Rankings (he had previously been ranked at #19), I arrived at two candidates: Nicholas Walters, the featherweight titlist from Jamaica, and Donnie Nietes, the junior flyweight champ from the Philippines.

Although Walters has the higher profile victory of the two, with his knockout win over Nonito Donaire, I believe that Nietes, who has also won a title at strawweight, has the stronger resume. Nietes is 10-0-1 in title fights and has made five defenses of his current light flyweight title. His resume includes good wins over Pornsawan Porpramook, Moises Fuentes (he also had a draw with him) and Ramon Hirales. Walters has impressive wins against Donaire and Vic Darchinyan but in my estimation Darchinyan was already on the downside of his career when they met and he was well above his best weight class. Thus, Nietes enters the Rankings at #20. The complete Saturday Night Boxing pound-for-pound list is below:

Floyd Mayweather

Roman Gonzalez

Wladimir Klitschko

Manny Pacquiao

Juan Manuel Marquez

Tim Bradley

Guillermo Rigondeaux

Carl Froch

Sergey Kovalev

Juan Estrada

Naoya Inoue

Adonis Stevenson

Miguel Cotto

Danny Garcia

Gennady Golovkin

Saul Alvarez

Takashi Uchiyama

Shinsuke Yamanaka

Terence Crawford

Donnie Nietes

Adam Abramowitz is the head writer and founder of saturdaynightboxing.com.He is also a member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board.@snboxing on twitter